A normal user's look into the world of 3D Stereo Technologies

GoPro, together with the surf brand Rip Curl, have created an interesting project as a part of upcoming marketing campaign for the surf brand, and the video embedded above showing some of the results possible. For the purpose of their needs a 48 camera array using GoPro HD Hero cameras has been built in waterproof casing and able to simultaneously shoot 720p video at 60 fps in order to create impressive bullet time like effects. This has been built to shoot the two time world champion surfer, Mick Fanning doing some impressive things on his surf board as well as some other popular surfers. And although the 48 camera array has been built for shooting in 2D, you can easily adapt it for making stereoscopic 3D video while producing the same impressive bullet-time effect in stereo 3D…

Using such a camera array for 3D would mean that instead of 48 2D frames you’d be getting from 24 stereo 3D pairs up to 47 (depending on the camera configuration) from the array as you’d have to pair the output of two cameras for each 3D frame. And since all this has to be done in the post-processing of the recorded footage, there is no need to do anything special for either shooting 2D or 3D footage with such an array. And since the synchronization of such camera array is done the same way that the GoPro 3D Hero camera kits synchronize two cameras for recording 3D footage, the results with form a camera array should not differ much than those achieved when shooting 3D with just two GoPro HD cameras. Only the time and resources needed for processing the footage and rendering the stereoscopic 3D output will increase a lot as you increase the number of cameras used in a camera array. And while this is just an example commercial project that probably wasn’t very cheap to realize, this example can open the doors for more affordable DIY projects using GoPro HD Hero cameras to create camera arrays for producing impressive effects and in stereo 3D as well.